And so we conduct peace talks for the eyes of Americans.

But if Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital undermines the Jewish state, why has every Israeli prime minister since Rabin not been charged with high treason for negotiating that exact solution, dividing the city?

Regardless of whether he has won UNSC approval, Abbas has won the UNGA to his side. This is something that Jewish state has never accomplished even once. In effect, Abbas has achieved a moral victory.

He did not harm his relations with the White House. Obama probably hates him just as he hated Netanyahu before, but that does not change the fact that Washington has no other party to support in the PA. To underscore that fact, the White House released $200 million in aid that it had threatened to withhold if Abbas applied to the UNGA for statehood recognition.

Nor will Israel be able to withhold tax transfers for long. Nor can it abandon Fatah militarily, unless we are willing to allow Hamas to take over the West Bank.

The Israeli arguments against the Palestinian bid were proved silly. Thus, to claim that mutually agreed-upon borders are a prerequisite for Palestine’s UN application is preposterous because the Jewish state itself came into being without a border agreement with its neighbors.

Arab diplomats revolted against Abbas for forcing their hand with his UNGA application. Indeed, they as well as their US and EU counterparts felt starkly irrelevant as Abbas dumped diplomatic intrigues in favor of appealing directly to people of the world. But they, too, will be forced back to the table by the US.

Perhaps Abbas miscalculated, imagining that he could push Obama into supporting his bid. Well, the US president is far more cynical than the Fatah leader had thought. Perhaps the peace process is now more dead than ever because the UNGA proved powerless against Jewish influence in Washington. But in the end Abbas was going down, anyway. And at least he is going down as a courageous leader who used his last chance to gain independence for his people—who happen to be our enemies.

Now the Israeli government is contemplating ‘goodwill gestures’ toward Fatah, such as ceding larger chunks of Judea and Samaria to Arab control.

Abbas’ move may alienate Western negotiators as unrealistic, but it may also set a new standard in negotiations with Israel. From that standard, the 1948–1967 borders would be viewed as a huge concession by the Palestinians.

Future Palestinian leaders, however, will dream of attaining the 1947 borders—and 1847, eventually.

Now, the taboo was silly to begin with: everyone understood the 1948 lines to be the basis for some demographic changes and swaps. Israel clung to it in the false expectation that we would be able to use it as a bargaining chip to force Palestinian acceptance of the Jewish state—that is, no right of return. Netanyahu played the same scenario when his government conditioned its acceptance of the 1948 lines on Palestinian acceptance of the Jewish state. But the Palestinians will refuse that condition, and in the course of time the Quartet will only remember Israel’s acceptance of the 1948 border.

As we have long predicted, the right of return inevitably found its way back to the negotiating table because of the policy of piecemeal concessions. At this time, everything else, including withdrawal from the Temple Mount, is agreed upon, and the Arabs lose nothing by pressing for the return of refugees’ descendants.

The Israeli plan to let them return to the West Bank won’t work: the PA government would never allow that, as the influx would break its civil society. Besides, the relatively affluent West Bankers hate the refugees and drove them away when Sharon attempted to relocate some of them from Gaza.

Also as we predicted, the Arabs have resorted to marching civilians across the Israeli border. The next action will include tens of thousands of people, and they might put women and children at the front. Israel lacks the skills to break up large-scale riots, though we still have two weeks to study the excellent tactics used by the Iranian police during the 2009 Tehran riots. Setting extensive minefields is one option; that way, at least, we won’t need Jewish soldiers to shoot Arab women.